Techno moves fast, always has. It's the genre's boon and its bane. To borrow a phrase from post-punk, techno's a speed trial, though not so much for its beats, but its turnover. The music industry may be slumping, but house and techno's deluge of new material continues unabated, fast and furious as ever. To get a sense of the genre's cruising speed, just spend a few weeks reading the Hot 100 Sales chart on the website of the German vinyl mailorder retailer Decks.de. Updated every week, and tracking sales over a three-week span, the chart's turnover is mind-numbing. Few records last more than two or three weeks before being displaced by new entries. No wonder that over the course of a given DJ's set, I might only identify a handful of tunes, despite the fact that this is a genre I devote most of my waking hours to. The pace of techno's output is like capitalism on speed, with innumerable, virtually identical products hitting the market in quick succession. Along the way, there are the interpretations, the innovations and the occasional improvement-- and that's why we keep listening. The rest of it is churn.

To be honest, I've been dreading writing this column. Going over a year's worth of notes and reviews and charts, what is there? Plenty of great tracks, of course-- some I'm still playing, some I've forgotten about. But can anything sum up the year in any kind of elegant fashion? In an article I wrote for the German magazine De:Bug's 10th anniversary issue in August, I noted the uncanny similarities between 2007 and 1997, from Carl Craig's chart supremacy to the fetishization of the pioneering Finnish label Sähkö's minimalistic aesthetic. It's not that techno went retro this year. And I hate to invoke the (capitalistic) concept of "diminishing returns." But 2007 felt less like a year of innovations, of bold leaps and technological alchemy, than a year of tweaks to the form, of honing in on what I've long called the "boom-tick template."

To illustrate the latter, you need look no further than Dubfire's "Ribcage". One of the year's biggest singles, it's also one of the most contentious. When the dance-music website Resident Advisor rated it only 1.5 on a scale of 5, their pan felt like a provocation, and that's just how many participants on the RA forums took it. In many ways, it's a fine track; when mixed well for the dancefloor, its shifting layers of ping-ponging bleeps and white noise create long, tension-loaded layers. Dubbing it a "tool," as RA's review did, seems a bit unfair; techno-- at least the more streamlined versions of it-- needs its tools. But something about "Ribcage" also feels oddly calculated, as though it were trying too hard to be epic, from its length (12:25) to its almost cautious sense of restraint. On the one hand it feels like an attempt at something I'd call "stadium minimal," which isn't necessarily a bad thing-- you could say the same of tracks by Carl Craig, Radio Slave, and Ricardo Villalobos. But without indulging in the risk-taking that makes those producers' best work so compelling, "Ribcage" ends up doing little more than stewing in its own juices. Some critics have attacked the tune for being opportunistic, given that Dubfire is best known as a member of the superstar progressive-house outfit Deep Dish, and it's certainly possible to read the record as an attempt to gain some underground credibility: from its sound to its one-sided pressing, duly adorned with a sticker that makes it look more like a bootleg, the record certainly aspires to a measure of underground cachet.

I don't mean to single out "Ribcage" as an act of bad faith, and I'm certainly not bothered that progressive house's mainstays are migrating towards other styles. (In any case, that's hardly a new development; DJs like John Digweed were charting Kompakt records a few years back, and the rise of German minimalists in the proving grounds of Ibiza have led to a lot of mingling between the Anglo-American old guard and the Continental upstarts.) But the degree to which "Ribcage" comes off as an exercise in textbook minimal is a reminder of how depressingly conservative the genre can be. It's the same problem facing indie rock: from home recording to DIY distribution, it's easier than ever to put a record out. (Mind you, I think this is a good thing: I made a record this year myself, recorded at home and released on a small label, so I'd be a hypocrite if I argued for higher barriers to entry.) But the sheer quantity of soundalike boompty-boompty is mind-numbing. I've always loved techno precisely for its streamlined seamlessness, but with so much material out there that sounds almost as if it's trying to be anonymous, indistinguishable, one begins to wonder if techno's long, asymptotal slope towards its ideal type isn't beginning to split subatomic hairs.

As a result, this year I've found myself most thrilled by moments of rupture. In my DJ sets over the past few months, my favorite moment has been closing with Nôze's fantastic (and poignant and cheeky) piano-house singalong, "Remember Love", a track whose every aspect resists slotting seamlessly into your typically greyscale set of tech-house. (The French seem particularly talented at these sorts of sideways jags, and I'm not just talking about Justice and their fondness for Rage Against the Machine; dig a little deeper than the "new French touch" hype and you'll discover a whole world of talented artists, mostly clustered around the labels Karat, Katapult and Circus Company, that have always excelled at fucking up techno's 4/4 formula with a careful balance of noise and melody. But that's another column.)

I can't be the only one who feels this way. I don't think it's a coincidence that 2007 was the year that Michael Mayer and Superpitcher, long proponents of techno's reductionist ideal, banded together as Supermayer to release Saves the World, a comic book hero-themed album full of oddball melodies and general excess. They caught a lot of flak for it, especially from fans who had been awaiting a Superminimal masterpiece. But they deserve more credit for taking a risk-- and for having a laugh. Like dubstep, techno can be way too self-serious for its own good. What happened to the euphoria? (Maybe it was the shift from ecstasy back to cocaine in dance culture.) In any case, Supermayer haven't entirely taken themselves out of the rave: Ewan Pearson's "Art of Getting Low Dub" of the duo's "The Art of Letting Go" is one of the year's best techno singles, at once piledriving and gurningly ecstatic. Ironically, Pearson practically described it in an email as a concession to the culture that spawned minimal-- "It's kind of deep acid verging on afterhours-ish for me (I'm not using the m-word, dammit)," he wrote. And yet it manages to sate a very specific sort of formal desire while remaining absolutely eccentric, unique. It's one of the best things Pearson has ever done.

And maybe the smart money is on the standout tracks after all. Love it or hate it, Samim's "Heater", with its garish accordion samples, couldn't be mistaken for anything like faceless textbook minimal. (The melody comes from Juan Jimenez' 1951 composition "La Cumbia Cienaguera", although I'm not sure which recording was used.) Even after the royalty checks have been paid out--Samim's label, Get Physical, licensed the sample from Sony BMG's Colombian division, which owns the original copyright-- what might have been a lark will have Samim and Get Physical laughing all the way to the bank. The record has sold an incredible 32,000 copies on vinyl, with an additional 15,000 paid downloads from Beatport alone, and it climbed as high as number 12 in the UK's pop charts. (Just for a bit of perspective, most 12" house and techno singles are lucky to sell a thousand copies these days.)

Of course, dance music has always loved its anthems, and snobs would do well to remember that tracks like Oakenfold's U2 remixes are as much a part of dance music's genetic makeup as are Basic Channel's Teflon repetitions. "Heater" follows Ricardo Villalobos' "Fizheuer Zieheuer" in the lineage of minimal-techno tunes that lean on big, instantly recognizable refrains copped from traditional music, and after the success of "Heater" we can expect to hear a lot more of them. There are already at least two on the market: Stefan Goldmann's excellent "Lunatic Fringe" (which was out on promo before the release of "Heater"), which samples a Bulgarian choir, and Lad & Dave the Hustler's "Era Bulgaris", which also samples a Bulgarian choir (one from Le Mystere du Voix Bulgares, if I'm not mistaken). The latter more like a cut-and-paste job, slapping the vox over a beat without doing much to link the two. I'm sure there will be more.

Between (or beyond) the poles planted by "Ribcage" and "Heater", of course, lie other options. (I should note that I think Samim has produced some brilliant music-- and I'm not even sure that "Heater" doesn't rank in that category.) A few weeks ago, I had the chance to spend a few hours in the Berlin studio of Tobias Freunde and Max Loderbauer, aka Non Standard Institute (or Nsi.), and whatever doubts I may have had about the future of techno-- a born doubter, I seem to go through these funks on a monthly basis-- vanished over the course of the recording.

Nsi., in case it's not obvious from the name, isn't your standard techno outfit. For starters, its members have history: Freund has been recording since 1980 (under the aliases Tobias and Pink Elln, among others, and as a member of Sieg Über Die Sonne and a frequent collaborator with Atom Heart), while Loderbauer, also a current member of Chica and the Folder, helped kick off ambient techno with his group Sun Electric back in 1990.

Nsi. haven't yet recorded much-- one 12-inch single for their own Non Standard Productions label and two CDs, for Ostgut Ton and Sähkö, respectively. (Freund and Ricardo Villalobos also recently released a collaborative single for NSP under the name Odd Machine.) But watching them at work was enough to make me wish for a world in which theirs were the only "techno" recordings available-- at least for a month or two, during which time other aspirants might be given a chance to play catch-up. No matter that most of nsi.'s work isn't banging enough to meet the amphetamine standards of most club publics; theirs is a vision of what club music could be.

As opposed to the thousands of producers banging away at the plug-in of the month, nsi. know their setup intimately. Loderbauer sits in front of a fairly mammoth bank of modular synthesizer components connected to a vintage-style step sequencer. Cables dangle dangerously; the array brims with knobs and excitable LEDs. Freund focuses his attention on a Roland TR-808 and TR-909, the definitive drum machines of techno. Joints are rolled, the audio software Logic is set rolling, and the two proceed to improvise. Loderbauer's sequences begin normally enough, mapping out the groove in generous bass lines and taut arpeggios, but as he begins to twist the dials, and as the LFOs of his synth begin to modulate, well, everything in sight, from waveforms to the pitch and step-lengths of the sequence itself, everything becomes malleable, mutable, liquid.

Repetition, the cornerstone of techno, is a constant presence, but an unstable one, like a drunk uncle who keeps slipping off to the kitchen for nips of eggnog at the holiday party; the groove is always crumbling into one-off sonic events that thrill and disappear. Across the room, Freund stands in front of his racked machines, taps at keys and twists at knobs, dropping beats in and out, tripping the kick over its own shadow. From what I understand of their process, only Loderbauer's synth work is being recorded into Logic; later, Freund will go back and re-improvise his own drum-machine sequences over the top, and the two strands will finally be edited together. The idea that any of this is not being recorded-- is happening and being lost, unrecoverable-- is incomprehensible. They play for perhaps an hour, barely communicating by any means other than musical. (At one point, Mambotur's Argenis Brito arrives from his own studio downstairs, clearly bored, trying to engage the two in conversation, but the most either will do is flash him a grin and hand the joint his way.) At the end of it all, I feel as though I've been through something. This is techno not as product, but as process-- an active practice whose end never eclipses the means used to attain it.

The realist in me knows that it would be foolish to imagine a world where nsi. were the standard-bearers for club music; their output is too eccentric to provide the rush required by a public in search of dependable arpeggios. It rewards primarily active listening, even if it doesn't require it. And very few artists can turn stuff like this out. That's both a drawback and a blessing in techno's headlong rush of a scene. The market needs more beats-per-minute, and, quite simply, more minutes of music, than the Non Standard Instituts of the world can turn out. There's churn to be churned-- a thought that has been depressing me a lot, of late. But a few hours spent with someone like nsi.-- or a few hours spent listening to their records, or any records that take you outside what you thought techno, or indeed any kind of music, was supposed to sound like-- is enough to make a whole year of music, at its most fertile and its most fallible, look worthwhile.